AirGradient is on a mission to make air quality monitoring accessible to everyone by offering open-source, open-hardware, and open-data solutions. They believe that accurate air quality monitoring should be affordable and that air quality data should be available to the public. However, AirGradient recently discovered that a popular low-cost outdoor air quality monitor restricts data sharing with third parties and claims ownership of the collected air quality data. This is concerning because it limits the availability of information and hinders innovation. AirGradient believes that charging customers for a device but then imposing restrictions on its main feature is not morally right. They see this as part of a larger trend of pushing people into proprietary ecosystems and closed data standards. AirGradient aims to provide an alternative with their open-hardware air quality monitors and kits.
https://www.airgradient.com/blog/when-you-own-a-monitor-but-not-its-data/